I en artikel i The New York Times Magazine beskriver Robert Draper den inre dynamiken i Team Trump och relationen mellan presidentkandidaten och hans närmaste medarbetare.

Though he was Trump’s top aide, Lewandowski was viewed by some political observers in Washington as a glorified body man — he seldom left the candidate’s side, and he lacked the blue-chip credentials usually characteristic of front-running campaign strategists. Lewandowski handled the details, not the vision. He was not a guru. Had he been, Trump, who is his own guru, would not have hired him. In his briefcase, Lewandowski carried a bulky black binder. It contained virtually everything of significance in Trump’s political universe: the daily, weekly and monthly master schedules; the full staff list with everyone’s contact information; a similar list of the campaign’s various contractors; daily talking points for staff and surrogates; a running tally of the delegate count; a list of Trump endorsers; a metrics chart of field activities in each state, including the daily number of calls made and doors knocked; position papers on each major issue; various documents requiring the candidate’s signature; and drafts of coming speeches. When he was not taking orders from the candidate, he was on the phone executing them, pacing around with his hand cupped over the receiver like an offensive coordinator furtively calling in plays.

What Lewandowski did have in common with David Axelrod, Karl Rove and other marquee strategists was a romanticized view of his candidate — one that even Trump, for all his self-regard, didn’t seem to share. Lewandowski saw him as a Braveheart-like hell-raiser tilting against a party elite that had not seen fit to embrace either of them. Though Lewandowski had kicked around in the political circles of New Hampshire for much of the past two decades, he had never seen thousands of people turn out to greet a candidate there the way they did his new boss. Nor had he expected the campaigns of more experienced candidates run by better-known consultants to collapse so quickly and spectacularly in the face of Trump’s challenge. Today, 15 months into the job, Lewandowski plainly admitted that he was not this campaign’s “architect.” Instead, he described himself to me as “a jockey on American Pharoah. You hold on and give him a little bit of guidance. But you’ve got to let him run.”

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Unlike most who held her job title, Hicks did not tend to the campaign’s messaging strategy. Nor did Hicks, who is 27, see it as her job to spend evenings sharing off-the-record insights over drinks with the traveling press corps. The rest of the Trump team felt similarly. This, combined with the campaign’s unusually long blacklist of media outlets it deemed unfair or unfriendly, had left reporters with few of the usual means of interpreting the campaign’s inner doings, requiring them to rely instead on more far-flung sources.

….]

Manafort had managed to impose a veneer of Beltway respectability on the campaign. More field organizers were now materializing in states like Pennsylvania, where local volunteers had hitherto been left largely to fend for themselves. Supporters who previously received no direction from the campaign before going on TV to expound on the candidate’s policies — “I just make [expletive] up,” Representative Duncan Hunter of California confessed to a Trump senior adviser — were now receiving daily talking points.

But the moment-to-moment decision-making — where to go, whom to see, what to say and how to say it — still rested almost exclusively upon the whims of Trump and, secondarily, with the person in his immediate proximity, who was almost always Lewandowski.

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Although his political maturation over the past year had not been altogether linear, it seemed clear that an understanding of what his candidacy meant to his supporters was taking root. Trump seemed aware, despite his insistence that voters of all stripes were drawn to him, that his constituency came chiefly from white working-class Americans who felt left out of the Obama recovery and cheated by what they saw as a rigged economic system. Playing to this sentiment, he had begun to include in his speeches a litany of dire economic statistics pertaining to whichever state he happened to be visiting at the time. The data, compiled by Sam Clovis and Stephen Miller, senior policy advisers, invariably cited the collapse of that local manufacturing sector over the past two decades. It had become axiomatic in Trump World that wherever jobs had been lost was also where Trump’s voters could be found. “They’re great people,” he murmured back on the plane after the event in Buffalo. “And they want help.” His face crinkled in disgust. “They don’t want hope. They want help.”